Gaming musings: The backlog pressure

 

 

Backlog pressure can take many forms, and mix various subtle feelings. My own backlog pressure feels like a persistent grinding (how ironic) on my gamer’s mind; it’s not overwhelming, but it’s nagging enough to dampen my gaming enjoyment at times. It often translates as guilt — but not just any guilt. One might think I feel guilty every time I purchase a new game — because dear Arceus, there are so many waiting already! — but NOPE! No matter how many games I own, I always get this delicious kick when I get my greedy paws on a new game. My guilt is all about the way I play my games — or don’t do so. I feel guilty about not playing games I bought ten years ago, about playing a game in depth at the expense of others, about tackling a N^th Pokemon solo run when there are so many unplayed games waiting in line.

 

 

For many years, I was totally immune to the backlog pressure; I was happy and proud about that immunity, and even paraded a bit and flaunted it at times. So what tipped the scales and allowed backlog pressure to worm its way into my gamer’s mind? I thought at first that the sheer accumulation of games was the main factor, which prompted me to devise the New Classics Project. Now that the deed is kinda done, I realise that the situation is more complex. See, as I was discarding games like my life depended on it during the New Classics Project, the backlog pressure didn’t abate like I thought it would. Bet you didn’t expect that plot twist, hey! 

 

 

After a bit of soul-searching, I’ve come to realise that all my backlogging woes can be blamed on a single factor, which is none other than loyalty. More precisely, an excess of it; or an extension of the concept in places where it shouldn’t exist. See, I feel a duty of sorts towards my games. I feel that I should give them all a fair chance to shine, and that I shouldn’t discard them before giving them said chance; and I just as strongly feel that I contracted that obligation the very moment I purchased them. 

 

 

The whole thing is just over-the-top, and completely out of place. Loyalty is fine in relationships with fellow humans, or living beings as a whole; but loyalty towards objects is just plain unpractical and pointless. I’m basically chaining myself to stuff, and creating obligations for myself out of thin air! When one considers the timing and rationale behind every gaming purchase and realises that circumstances may have changed wildly since said purchase, this clutching to loyalty becomes all the more absurd and counter-productive. Case in point: I purchased Tactics Ogre for the PSP back in mi-2013, at a time when I only owned the PSP, the DS and 20-or-so games. Ten years later, I own six systems and hundreds of games, and I’ve come to realise that I don’t fancy SRPG that much. Forcing myself to play Tactics Ogre despite all that was a complete waste of my loyalty.

 

 

But wait, I hear you say, didn’t you want to play Tactics Ogre? What about your gaming instinct? Well, that’s the trick: that loyalty of mine towards every game I welcome into my Collection superseded my gaming instinct. Or, more precisely, my gaming instinct operated inside the confines of my loyalty towards my games. It speaks volumes that in all these years, I never did any sort of background maintenance of my collection: it’s been the same since the very beginning, just growing ever larger. It would have made sense to, let’s say, ditch this game I bought on a complete whim, or that game that belongs to a genre I don’t fancy; but such natural occurrences never happened. They never happened because they couldn’t happen: until I uncovered that blinding, binding loyalty of mine, I was simply unable to ditch a game before playing it. Hence the darn backlog pressure.

 

 

Does this mean that I am now able to ditch a game without playing it first? I honestly don’t know at that point. Identifying the cause of my backlog pressure certainly removed a lot of said pressure; the consequences of that epiphany on my Collection remain to be seen, and will probably take some time to unfold. One thing is abundantly clear, though: the New Classics Project is now officially defunct! My gaming instinct will run the show from now on; and it will do so without being hindered by my overbearing loyalty. This will be some sort of permanent maintenance, like a software running in the background; and I just cannot wait to see how my gaming instinct will fare ^^ 

 

One last question for the road: what does make a game a Cult Classic? For me, it’s always a natural and effortless gelling between several elements. It’s the way a game scratches just the right itch, while inserting itself perfectly into my life at that moment and generating tons of emotions and memories. This is something that cannot be engineered, nor reproduced at will; it can happen with perfectly crappy games, and not happen with undeniably excellent ones. The New Classics project reminded me that you just have to breathe, relax, and let things happen. Just play it your way, baby! 🤩